We Are Born Incomplete

Berenice Olmedo and the 2026 CIFO x Ars Electronica Award

A sculptor who builds her work from prosthetic legs and orthopedic braces has won CIFO’s new-media award. Her argument: dependence is not a deficiency — it is the human condition.

In December 2025, the Cisneros Fontanals Art Foundation named the recipients of the fifth

CIFO x Ars Electronica Award. Two artists were chosen from more than one hundred submissions spanning eleven Latin American countries. One of them is Berenice Olmedo — a sculptor born in Oaxaca in 1987 and based in Mexico City — whose project Sinécdoque receives a 30,000-dollar commission, will premiere this September at the Ars Electronica Festival in Linz, Austria, and will then enter CIFO’s permanent collection.

Olmedo makes sculptures and kinetic installations out of the apparatus of medical correction: prosthetic legs, spinal corsets, hip-and-knee braces, cervical collars, surgical implants. Hung from transparent wire and animated by small motors, her works strain and shift and try to stand. They are unmistakably bodily, and they belong to no body in particular. What holds the practice together is a refusal — the refusal to treat the human body as something that ought to be whole, efficient, or self-sufficient. It is a position with consequences, and Olmedo has been working it out, material by material, for more than a decade.

The Bodies a Society Discards

Before the orthopedic braces, there were the dogs. Between 2012 and 2015, in a project titled Canine Tomatocommerce, or The Political-Ethical Dilemma of Merchandise, Olmedo collected the carcasses of stray dogs killed by cars on the roads outside Puebla and converted them into consumer goods — soap rendered from fat, boots and bags cut from skin — which she then sold at a local flea market. The carcasses themselves were never exhibited. The point was the transformation: what a society decides is worthless, and what it will pay to buy back.

That early work set the terms for everything since. Olmedo’s subject is the population a culture sorts to its margins — the stray, the disabled, the discarded — and the machinery that does the sorting. Around 2018, for her first solo exhibition, in Cologne, she found her enduring material. She began repurposing secondhand orthotic devices, many of them small and brightly patterned, that had once belonged to children who outgrew them. She bought them at a flea market in Iztapalapa, a poorer district of Mexico City, where polluted water and air raise the rate of congenital deformity — and, with it, the supply of cast-off prosthetics. One of the earliest of these pieces, Olga, joined a child’s prosthetic legs to a hidden motor, so that the legs lifted and reached, again and again, toward standing.

The Myth of the Whole Body

Olmedo’s studio in Mexico City sits beside an ortopedia, an orthopedic workshop, and she enlists its technicians to fabricate her pieces. For Hic et Nunc, her 2022 exhibition at Kunsthalle Basel, she moved further into the clinic. Working with a rehabilitation center, she took casts from its archive of molds of amputees’ leg stumps and built them into new, suspended limb-sculptures — animated by robotic mechanisms she developed after undergoing electro-stimulation therapy herself. The results hover on their wires, present and mobile and anonymous at once.

She often names these works after real people: the patients whose prosthetics she appropriates, among them children she came to know while volunteering at Mexico City’s Centro de Rehabilitación Infantil Teletón. The gesture is at once sentimental and pointedly political. It keeps the person lodged inside the object, and refuses the abstraction that would let a viewer admire the sculpture while forgetting the body it was built around.

Critics tend to describe Olmedo’s work as a challenge to “ableist standards of normativity.” Her own framing is less oppositional than generative. Drawing on disability studies and cyborg theory, she argues that the autonomous, self-sufficient human is a Western myth — that every one of us is born incomplete, and remade continuously through tools, devices, and other people. A prosthesis, in this account, is not a correction of a lack. It is a visible instance of something already true of every body.

“There is no stigma of disability in the world I propose, but only variations of existence, variations of movement, variations on slowness and speed.” — Berenice Olmedo.

Synecdoche, a Project That Keeps Living

The work funded by CIFO and Ars Electronica expands the boundaries of her research into even more complex territory. While the artist previously explored organic automation with her installation Pnoê at the 36th Bienal de São Paulo(September 2025 – January 2026), her new project, Synecdoche, takes this premise to the next level through ex vivoperfusion—the biomedical technique that keeps organs alive outside the body by circulating oxygenated fluids. For this new commission, Olmedo combines pneumatic systems, orthopedic and prosthetic materials, and reconstructed medical devices, working in direct collaboration with Oliver Peters, a biomedical engineer at the artificial-heart company Berlin Heart.

It is, by design, hard to look at comfortably. An organ sustained outside its body is alive in no ordinary sense and dead in none either; it is the clearest possible picture of the interdependence Olmedo has spent her career describing. The project also keeps a sharp political edge. She makes this work, she has noted, in a country marked by deep medical inequality — precarious access to care, high amputation rates, chronic shortages of transplant organs. The philosophical question and the material one turn out to be the same: what does a body owe to the systems that keep it running, and what happens to the people those systems fail?

Synecdoche premieres at the Ars Electronica Festival in Linz from September 9 to 13, 2026, and afterward enters the CIFO Collection. The award is the new-media strand of CIFO’s Grants & Commissions Program, run since 2022 with Ars Electronica to support Latin American artists working with technology. Olmedo’s mechatronic sculptures — built with motors, sensors, microcontrollers, and pneumatics — answer that brief precisely, even as they keep their oldest materials, the braces and the casts, close at hand.

CIFO POINT OF VIEW

Olmedo’s selection says something about what the Grants & Commissions Program is for. The program exists to let artists develop work outside the pressures of the marketplace, and her practice is a study in why that latitude matters. The work depends on relationships built inside clinics and rehabilitation centers over years, and it produces objects that are at once genuinely beautiful and genuinely difficult to live with. In a purely commercial setting, it would be easy to keep the beauty and quietly drop the argument. To fund the work, premiere it, and bring it into a permanent collection is a way of insisting that the argument travels with the object. Olmedo asks her audience to surrender a comfortable assumption — that the healthy body is whole and the dependent body is lacking — and to consider instead that dependence is simply what it is to be a person. That is not a regional theme. It is one of the more clarifying propositions in contemporary art, and this year it reaches a wider public from Oaxaca by way of Mexico City.

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

Berenice Olmedo — a sculptor born in Oaxaca, Mexico, in 1987 and based in Mexico City — is one of two recipients of the 2026 CIFO x Ars Electronica Award, the new-media strand of the Cisneros Fontanals Art Foundation’s Grants & Commissions Program. She was selected alongside Peruvian artist Lorena Solís Bravo from more than one hundred submissions representing eleven Latin American countries.

The award supports Synecdoche, an evolving project that builds kinetic sculpture from prosthetics, orthopedic braces, and reconstructed medical devices. Its newest phase draws on ex vivo perfusion — the technique that keeps organs alive outside the body — and is developed with biomedical engineer Oliver Peters of Berlin Heart. The 30,000-dollar commission premieres at the Ars Electronica Festival in Linz, Austria, September 9–13, 2026, and then enters the CIFO Collection.

Olmedo’s practice challenges the idea of the body as a self-sufficient whole, drawing on disability studies and cyborg theory to argue that dependence — on tools, devices, and care — is the shared human condition. Her work has been shown at Kunsthalle Basel, ICA Boston, BAMPFA, and the 36th Bienal de São Paulo, and appears in New Humans: Memories of the Future at the New Museum, New York.